What does Normal mean?

So today was the first day of the Japanese Government hosted ‘Normalisation’ meeting, intended to find a pathway to resume commercial whaling.

As I said yesterday, it was definitely a gathering of the countries who support whaling. Of course, I should have known that when you have a meeting of people that all agree with each other it is going to get boring, but this was worse than I could have imagined!

Greenpeace greeted delegates this morning as they arrived at the meeting with our new whale costume and name badges for each delegate with Japanese yen attached to them, symbolising the financial incentives offered to many countries to support Japan’s stance.

There was strong media interest in the event, with a scrum of camera’s for the start of the day. I also did a live appearance on BBC World from their Tokyo studio – you can see it on the web here.

The meeting itself was just plain odd. I have been to a few international political meetings in my time, but nothing like this. Overall it was a bit chaotic. The agenda is vague, and there is no real structure to the meeting. It seems the organisers probably have already written the final outcome, and are now wondering how to fill in the time before presenting it.

How can I draw this conclusion so early? Well, the Mission Statement for the meeting describes the aim of the meeting as being to “put forward specific measures to resume the function of the IWC as a resource management organisation”. The basically means hunting whales.

The morning session was basically countries making introductory speeches. Many countries complained bitterly about the 'boycott' by the anti-whaling countries, asking 'how can we have a dialogue if they don't come?'. This went on for a while until one delegate pointed out that the whalers had been boycotting the Conservation Committee in the IWC since it was formed several years ago!

One theme that came up was in talking about why the IWC is dysfunctional. A number of delegates put the blame with "extreme NGO's who are just out to make money" and also with the media. In response, a number of delegates suggested closed meetings of the IWC and/or secret ballots. Glad to see ideas of transparency are alive and well in this crowd!

I will finish with my favourite intervention of the day, which came from the delegate of St Lucia. It was in a discussion about why the anti-whaling countries took the stance they did, and he argued it is because they want to protect their livestock industries. The logic appeared to be that if whale meat was on the market, this would undercut the beef trade!

So we continue tomorrow – a fantastic way to spend Valentine’s Day!

Shane